Space & Sexuality

We are all familiar with the problematic and limiting dichtomy of the Global North and Global South; how can we then research and practise solidarity that refuses this split geography? In Niharika Banerjea and Kath Browne's project Liveable Lives: Living and Surviving LGBTQ Equalities in India and the UK attempted exactly this. They join the podcast this week to discuss this work.

Shownotes:
Sappho for Equality https://www.sapphokolkata.in/ 
Beyond Opposition project https://beyondopposition.org/about-the-project/ 
Development Studies Association Ireland
Carol Ballantine (University College Dublin, UCD)
Nita Mishra (University of Limerick)
Rohit K. Dasgupta (London School of Economics, LSE)
Count Me In Too https://www.countmeintoo.co.uk/ 
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 (India, 31.3.26)
De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives (Kulpa and Mizielinska, 2011)
Heteroactivism (Catherine Nash and Kath Browne, 2020)
“Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?”, Adorno Prize Lecture in Radical Philosophy (Judith Butler, 2012)
Liveable Lives (Niharika Banerjea and Kath Browne, 2023)

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

What are the geographies of film? Helen Leung joins the podcast to discuss how films are integral to place-making in both material and aesthetic senses. Whilst geography can turn to films for visual representations of spaces, experimental techniques that mediate space and politicised narratives that trouble them, Helen emphasises that geography can be deployed to study queer screen cultures too. In particular, we consider the Vancouver Queer Film Festival as a spatial phenomenon, and discuss what Helen and others call "inter-referencing", which offers an alternative mode of critique to "comparison".

Shownotes:
- Vancouver Queer Film Festival (Website): https://outonscreen.com/vqff/ 
- Better Than Chocolate (1999, dir. Anne Wheeler)
- Meditation Park (2017, dir. Mina Shum)
- World Film Locations book series (Intellect Books) 
- “Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong”, in Urban Studies (Yue and Leung, 2015)
- Global Queer, Local Theories. Special Issue in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2007)
- Global Queer Cinema (Website): https://globalqueercinema.com/ 
- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, dir. Jane Schoenbrum)
- Sandbag Dam (2025, dir. Čejen Černić Čanak)


Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

We get by with a little help from our friends, and for LGBTQ+ people, sometimes our friendships are what sustain us. In this episode I (Joe Jukes) reflect on the chapter "LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: queer socialities in the making of a new rural" (2025) to explore why a queer friendship is not the same as a "chosen family", as soothing as that phrase may be. I also talk about my home region, the West Country in South West England and the particular, queer carspaces I experienced there during my PhD research. Ultimately, along with my colleague Derek Ruez, we think about queer space's capacity to bring people together and create places of political solidarity.

Shownotes:
- For Space (Doreen Massey, 2005)
- The Radical Faeries of Albion
- The Wurzels
- Critical Friendship Studies
- Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (John Howard, 1999)
- The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
- “Friendship as a Way of Life” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (Paul Rabinow, 1994)
- Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement, (Tom Roach, 2011)
- Asexual Geographies

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

Derek Ruez joins the show to talk about tensions and politics within the rainbow. Whilst Pride is a moment where many communities under the LGBTQ+ come together to make collective demands, it is also a space where multiple tensions emerge and conflicting politics are enacted. Derek shares his research into the multiple Pride-spaces of Copenhagen, in which the politics of migration and racialisation affect LGBTQ+ mobilisations across the city. Our conversation also considers the value of place-specificity as a core component of queer and geographic scholarship. Context, it turns out, is always key for both researching, and making demands of, our personal and political worlds!

Shownotes:
- Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Puar, 2007)
- Nordic Exceptionalism
- “A global sense of place” in Marxism Today (Doreen Massey, 1991)
- “How do you critique activists? Some reflections on doing environmentalism badly” in Social and Cultural Geography (Amy Robson, 2026)
- “Placing LGBTQ+ Urban Activisms” in Urban Studies (Alison Bain and Julie Podmore, 2021)

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

What is LGBTQ+ life like in the suburbs? Some would argue it isn't very vibrant, if it is there at all. Alison Bain and Julie Podmore join the podcast this week to share how that argument doesn't hold for Canadian metropolitan suburbs. Their book "Queerburbia" presents research findings from 10 municipalities across Canada and in this episode they outline some of its key contributions. Speaking about the "queerburban", Alison and Julie reflect on the enabling power of neologisms in making the unnamed and overlooked aspects of (urban) life concrete. As it relates to the queerburban, place is made, unmade and remade by a variety of institutional, governmental, civic and subcultural actors that are very much a part of city life writ large.

Shownotes:
- Metronormativity (the associative assumption that conflates queer life with the city, and queerphobic violence with the countryside)
- Queerburbia: LGBTQ2S Suburban Place-Making (Alison Bain and Julie Podmore, 2025)
- Life Takes Place : Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making (David Seamon, 2018)
- Performative progressiveness: Accounting for new forms of inequality in the gayborhood, in City & Community (Brodyn and Ghaziani, 2018)
- The Empire of the Peace Arch Monarchy Association
- Youth For A Change
- PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)
- Les centres de femmes https://rcentres.qc.ca/ 

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

Student housing is a space that many people live 'through', but what structures this living, its gender and sexual possibility? In our discussion, Dr. Chan Arun-Pina problematises how student housing is conceptualised, as it figures a temporary and transitory form of accommodation that constrains experimentation, transformation and senses of permanence. Chan's chapter discusses the cisheteronormativity of housing and its norms and draws from their research into queer senses of home and 'domicide' in India. This research analyses the violence and trauma that can be associated with queer and trans relations to home and the security it (is supposed to) afford dwellers. Chan also shares their unique visual approach to 'blueprinting' socio-spatial research through their multiple roles as an artist, architect and academic. Listen to find out more if you're interested built spaces and the lives they mediate or render impossible.

Shownotes:
- “Rethinking domicide: Towards an expanded critical geography of home”, in Geography Compass (Mel Nowicki, 2014)    
- Domicide: The global destruction of home (Porteus & Smith, 2011)
- The Production of Space (Henri Lefebvre, 1974)
- “Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment” in Studies in Gender and Sexuality (Chris Straayer, 2020)

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

How do you notice the world around you? And how reciprocally can you live with it? In this episode, CWH discusses "queer and trans ecologies", which describe ways of being with non-human species and environmental processes that relate to non-normative embodiment and critical, reparative politics. Cleo reflects on being in dialogue with species and elements that do not use language, as well as what queer and trans geographic practice can look like in and beyond academia.

Shownotes:
- Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (Wölfle Hazard, 2022)
- “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances” in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space (Matthew Gandy, 2012)
- “Critical observational drawing in geography: Towards a methodology for ‘vulnerable’ research” in Progress in Human Geography (Sage Brice, 2023)
- The Gold Fish Casino dir. Sarolta Jane Vay colour, HD video, 33 mins. (2017)
- The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined (Hazard, 2012); The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined, Directed by Ezra Nepon, CounterPULSE, San Francisco, 7/12/12.
- Beachcombing with Barad (not published)

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

Amsterdam is one of the world's "gay capitals", but how does queer life take place there? Like other large cities, Amsterdam features a variety of spaces for LGBTQ+ people, each with its own set of norms, socio-economic priorities, imagined client groups and distinct feels. In this episode, Avery Franken shares her Masters' research project which considers the variety of place-making work undertaken across the city, and the inclusions and exclusions this produces. Avery shares ethnographic detail about Amsterdam's queer scene and its POC-led spaces, which may sometimes be overlooked by thinkers and visitors from abroad. Listen to find out more.

Shownotes:
- De Sering, Amsterdam https://desering.org/ 
- Bar Barrio
- FLINTA (Female, Lesbian, Intergender, Non-binary, Trans and Agender people)
- Rhythms of Love Research Project https://rhythms-of-love.com/ 

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

Academia has a language problem, and the geographies of sexualities are no exception. Whilst the field, at least from my vantage point, is dominated by English scholarship, many worthwhile ideas, concepts and approaches are written and shared through other languages. In this episode Dr. Karin Duplan from the University of Geneva reflects on how she has worked to bridge Francophone geographies of sexualities literatures with other global scholarship. We also discuss her work on inclusive cities, where she considers what makes a city a queer city.

Shownotes:
- Tiran Willemse (dancer, choreographer and researcher)
- French geographies of sexualities
- European Geographies of Sexualities Conference
- Queer(s) in Exile: a sensory ethnography for spatial justice (Project) https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/221128 

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]

The metaphor of the closet is perhaps one of the strongest narrations of queer life. The Gay Liberation Front famously commanded queers to come "out of the closets and into the streets". But what are the limitations of closet-thinking? Who does it include and exclude in its imaginaries? And what is the geography of the closet? In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Ale Boussalem from the University of St. Andrews, who shares his research on the racialisations and spatialiations of the closet.

Shownotes:
- Epistemology of the Closet (Eve K. Sedgwick, 1990)
- “A place where there is no need to explain: LGBTQ Muslims, collective disidentification and queer space in Brussels, Belgium”, in Social & Cultural Geography (Ale Boussalem, 2023)
- “In, out, or somewhere else entirely: going beyond binary constructions of the closet in the lives of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels”, in Transactions IBG (Boussalem, 2021)
- “When the spotlight is always on the neighborhood: LGBTQ people from a Muslim background deconstructing imagined borders in Brussels, Belgium” in Sexualities (Boussalem, 2023)

Podcast e-mail: [email protected]

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]